Watt Brothers, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow - Tinker Tailor Location

Glasgow was used as the location for the Czech town of Brno. When the BBC were looking for locations to shoot, a scout stumbled across Watt Bros' long closed subterranean shopping mall, which was then used as extra storage space.

Once a basement bolthole for the city's fashionable shoppers, the underground arcade featured a sweeping Art Deco staircase, leading to a labyrinth of beautifully lit display windows and fitting rooms. Even better, as luck would have it, the entire mall was lined with marble imported from Czechoslovakia, as well as fabulous terrazzo tiling. 

Come the shoot, on a Sunday morning, all the street signs around Hope Street and Sauchiehall Street were swapped for Czech ones; roles of rubber setts/cobbles were laid across the asphalt streets, and some Eastern European cars rolled into place to create a corner in downtown Brno.

A matte painting for the establishing shot changed the outside appearance of the upper part of the building.

The second street scene where Jim Prideaux emerges from the arcade and crosses the road was filmed at 140 Sauchiehall Street. The facade is of a warehouse which became the front of the Gaumont cinema in 1910. The Gaumont closed in 1972 but the facade was again retained and currently forms the frontage of the Savoy shopping centre. 

The rather monstrous edifice above the entrance to the mall in the series is another matte painting. There was a short retrospective on the shoot published in the The Herald in 2018.

With thanks to 'Lost Glasgow' for some of the additional details about this location shoot.